The Comic's Comic Presents Last Things First

Mo Mandel is a stand-up comedian who created and executive produces Comedy Knockout for truTV, where comics zing each other and try to win over the studio audience. Before that, he hosted truTV's BARmageddon and appeared more than 40 times on the panel of Chelsea Lately. You've seen him as a co-star on such TV series as Modern Family, Castle and Happy Endings, on his own in a half-hour Comedy Cent...

Sam Morril is one of the fastest rising-rising stand-up comics in NYC, having just come off hosting two seasons of  People Talking Sports  on the MSG network. Morril also has performed on America's Got Talent, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Conan, and Last Comic Standing . He's risen from Comedy Central's Comics to Watch to his own hour special on the network, premiering September 14, 2018. I...

Jonathan Katz won Comedy Central's first-ever Emmy Award for his critically-acclaimed animated series, Dr. Katz, in the mid-1990s. He followed that up with a Peabody Award in 1998. Twenty years later, he's entertaining us anew with therapy sessions with his famous funny friends in a brand-new Dr. Katz: The Audiobook, for Amazon's Audible. But before he ever began his comedy career, he led a wonder...

Elayne Boosler's comedy career began by working the door as the hostess at the original Improvisation club in New York City in the 1970s. For over forty years, she has appeared on seemingly every talk show ever on TV, has written and starred in five of her own one-hour Showtime standup comedy specials, written and directed two movies for Cinemax. She self-financed that first special, 1985's "Party...

Maeve Higgins was a bestselling memoirist and comedian in her native Ireland when, at the age of 31, she decided to move to America. So immigration isn't just the subject of her hit podcast, Maeve In America: Immigration IRL, but also a first-hand experience. She co-hosts Neil deGrasse Tyson's StarTalk on National Geographic, as well as the weekly comedy showcase Butterboy in Brooklyn with Aparna...

Judd Apatow and Pete Holmes first met on a podcast, and ever since, have developed a wonderful working relationship. Holmes first pitched the idea for Crashing to Apatow on his late great TBS late-night show, and I caught up with both the stand-up comedian and the writer/director/producer on the set of HBO's Crashing at The Comedy Cellar, where they were filming an upcoming episode for the comedy'...

Zainab Johnson had other plans for her life, perhaps professional basketball or teaching, before a tragic accident changed her life and her worldview. Johnson tells me how she absorbed the lessons of the comedians she hung out with before jumping into comedy herself. So far, so good. After being named a New Face at Montreal's Just For Laughs Festival in 2014, she has appeared on HBO's All Def Come...

In 2011, Rafinha Bastos was named the most influential person on Twitter. Not then-President Barack Obama. Not the Pope. Brazilian comedian and TV personality Rafinha Bastos. Bastos has upward of 12 million Twitter followers now. He sat down with me during Montreal's Just For Laughs festival to talk about how his dreams shifted from journalism to basketball to comedy, how free speech isn't so free...

Paul  Mecurio  is seen every night by audiences of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert , as he warms them up before the CBS cameras turn on for taping.  Mecurio  graduated from law school and started out on Wall Street, though, before ever discovering his passions for comedy and getting a big break by selling a joke to Jay Leno.  Mecurio  has known Colbert for more than two decades, as he was one o...

Allan Havey  is a comedian and actor who hosted a late-night talk show for the Comedy Channel (before it was Comedy Central) called Night After Night with Allan Havey.  You might not have heard much from him in the 1990s and much of the 2000s. But he's certainly enjoying a renaissance in the past decade, since acting in the 2009 Steven Soderbergh film, The Informant! then continuing with appearanc...

This is a special edition of Last Things First, recorded live during Clusterfest 2018 in San Francisco. Comedy Central was kind enough to ask me to host a series of Clusterfest panels for the media that they called fireside chats. In this session, I welcomed the Roastmaster himself, Jeff Ross, and two-time Roast Battle runner-up Matt Broussard to talk about the art of roasting, the development of...

Sam Grittner is one of the best comedians on Twitter. Don't take my word for it? OK then how about Rolling Stone, Huffington Post and famous comedians such as Weird Al Yankovic, who are among the tens of thousands who follow him and have put him on best of lists in four of the past five years. Grittner also created the parody account @tonightongirls in 2013 and served as lead writer for Internet A...

Paula Poundstone started her comedy career in Boston in the late 1970s before taking her act and her life on the road to San Francisco. Poundstone broke through in a big way in 1984 when Robin Williams asked her to perform stand-up on the episode he guest hosted of Saturday Night Live. She would go on to film two comedy specials for HBO and one for Bravo, become the first woman to deliver the keyn...

This is a special edition of Last Things First, recorded live during Clusterfest 2018 in San Francisco. Comedy Central was kind enough to ask me to host a series of Clusterfest panels for the media that they called fireside chats. In this session, I welcomed Sasheer Zamata, Roy Wood Jr., and Mark Normand. We joked about whether comedians should ever apologize, about getting advice from comedians a...

Romesh Ranganathan was a math teacher before devoting his life to stand-up comedy in 2012. Since then, he has found great success in the UK, nominated for Best Newcomer at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013, and with TV appearances on Live at the Apollo , many panel shows, and his own BBC series for two years, Asian Provocateur . For his next trick, Romesh came to America to see if he could duplicate hi...

This is a special edition of Last Things First, recorded live during Clusterfest 2018 in San Francisco. Comedy Central was kind enough to ask me to host a series of Clusterfest panels for the media that they called fireside chats. In this session, I welcomed Jim Jefferies, Rachel Feinstein, Nikki Glaser and Sam Morril, and we quickly got into the headlines of Roseanne Barr and Samantha Bee making...

Nemr grew up in San Diego and then moved back with his family to Lebanon, where he almost singlehandedly introduced the Middle East to the idea of live stand-up comedy. He definitely introduced many American comedians to Middle Eastern audiences over the past decade and more, and he has since toured both there and here in the States as a headliner. You may have seen him on CNN and Comedy Central's...

Joshua Jean-Baptiste   and Edson Jean met as students at New World School of the Arts in Miami, where both learned how to become multi-hyphenates in this new world of show business, as actors, playwrights and filmmakers. Jean's college thesis, the short film The Adventures of Edson Jean , was licensed by HBO, and he has appeared in TV and film projects including Moonlight, War Dogs, Ballers and Bl...

Mark Viera has entertained audiences around the world with stories of growing up, getting married and raising kids in the Bronx. Viera has released a Showtime special, "Tales of a Nuyorican," opened on tours with singer Marc Anthony and comedian Gabriel Iglesias, and performed everywhere from cruise ships to the Leathernecks of the U.S. Marine Corps. Viera sat down with me to talk about his career...

Who is Nell Scovell? She's the creator of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch , first staff writer hired for SPY magazine, second woman ever to write for The Simpsons , and one of only a handful of women to ever write for David Letterman. Scovell's other TV credits include Murphy Brown , Coach and The Muppets . She also wrote jokes for President Barack Obama at the White House Correspondents Dinner, and co...

Jim Florentine rose to fame with his bestselling recordings Terrorizing Telemarketers and by voicing the wildly popular character Special Ed for Comedy Central's "Crank Yankers." Florentine has won an Emmy for his work on HBO's "Inside the NFL" and had two Billboard top-ten comedy albums within a single year. He used to co-host That Metal Show for VH1 and continues to host the Metal Midgets show o...

Jim O'Heir is an Emmy-winning actor and  comedian  best known for co-starring as  Jerry Gergich  on the NBC sitcom  Parks and Recreation . He's a Chicago guy who trained at Second City in the 1980s, then thrived in an independent improv and sketch group called White Noise, which took him out to Hollywood. O'Heir enjoyed tons of small guest-starring roles on TV for the past two decades before landi...

Louie Anderson won an Emmy Award for his performance as Christine Baskets in FX's Baskets . He previously won Emmys two decades earlier for his voiceover work in his own animated series Life of Louie . He's also hosted Family Feud , made a memorable early splash in the Eddie Murphy movie Coming To America , and was part of Rodney Dangerfield's 9th Young Comedians Special. He just released his late...

Brandon Rogers is a YouTube star with four million subscribers and one Streamy Award to his credit. He has starred in two webseries, Sam and Stuff for Facebook, and Magic Funhouse for Fullscreen. Brandon was a New Face at Just For Laughs in 2017, and he stopped by my studio while he's on his first live comedy tour this spring. So let's get to it!

In the movie Most Likely To Murder , Adam Pally wants everyone in his hometown on Long Island to believe he's still the king of his high school, now making it big in Las Vegas when in reality, he's still stuck working as a bathroom attendant. Over a holiday weekend, he drags them all into his murder-mystery comedy, including Rachel Bloom, John Reynolds and Vincent Kartheiser. The film premiered at...